Page 999 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 26 July 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
time they need to spend in their cars. It is about where those cars travel; it is about how that environment is polluted.
We have a planned city, we have a special city, and we must work towards retaining that city. The City Residents Coalition and its member groups have in their various different forms been concerned about these issues for many years and have carried the flag for many years because, of course, the concern has affected them directly.
I can go back through many years of negotiations with NCDC and the ACT Administration in its various other forms. I can comment on the sorts of fights - and that is the only word that is appropriate - that they have been putting up and feeling they have been losing because we have not had an appropriate planning situation, appropriate legislation and an appropriate appeals system.
It extends well beyond the inner city. The same problems that have been affecting the city have, in the reverse, been affecting Tuggeranong. Those decentralised areas are ones which need the development, and there are ways and means of ensuring that the development gets there. We are looking for the incentives; we should be finding incentives.
We should be ensuring that our lease purposes restrict use by the Commonwealth public service. We have control over that sort of thing; all we need is the legislation; all we need is the will to control it, so that a secretary to a department who happens to feel that it suits him or her to have the department in the centre of Civic does not have the entire say and inflict that view on the whole department.
Planning issues go further; they are about heritage. We have seen the demolition of houses in Murray Crescent and in Barton, and I am told that there is a bulldozer today parked outside a house in Griffith. (Extension of time granted)
We are monitoring what is going on, but I am sure it is just happily parked there in the street minding its own business. I hope it does not get a parking ticket. It is parked outside a house that was recommended for consideration in the central Canberra heritage study. Should there be any movement of that bulldozer, no doubt I will contact the Chief Minister as quickly as I possibly can.
It illustrates more than anything that we need planning legislation in place which will allow us to protect our environment and our heritage. If I can move further to our environment, let me say that the green space in Canberra, the relationship of those decentralised towns to each other and the relationship of the amount of green space to built-up space in suburbs are all planning factors, but they are also environmental factors.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .